Federal prosecutors filed a record number of healthcare fraud cases in the last fiscal year, up nearly 10 percent since 2004, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
TRAC, a nonprofit group from Syracuse University that keeps records of federal spending, used the Freedom of Information Act to acquire data from the Department of Justice (DOJ), which revealed 377 cases of healthcare fraud. That’s the largest number of such cases filed in a year since the passage of the federal Health Care Fraud law.
TRAC co-director Susan Long told the AP that these record numbers suggest the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services are stepping up their efforts against healthcare fraud, an area that she also said the Obama administration “is not ignoring.”
According to the DOJ data, the FBI led 46.4 percent of the last fiscal year’s federal healthcare fraud prosecutions, with the HHS taking the lead in 36.6 percent of the cases, although many of these fraud cases actually originated with the HHS before being handed over to the FBI.
The data also revealed that the largest annual increase in the rate of prosecutions over the years was 1200 percent in the Southern District of Illinois, while the Eastern District of Missouri had the greatest decrease in federal healthcare fraud prosecutions at 30.8 percent.